Dutch, an American Legend

The Story of a Foul-Mouthed, Chain-Smoking, Mill Mechanic with the Heart of a Lion

Every version of this story ever told agrees that events unfolded on a beautiful summer day out in logging country. Set your mental picture to the Pacific Peninsula of Washington state, outside the city of Aberdeen, where the local sawmill workers are facing off on a baseball diamond against the pulpmill workers from the next town over. Green grass, emerald trees, blue skies, crisp white chalk lines, and dozens of families eating concessions watching from the stands.

It should be a wholesome scene, except for the short balding man on third base. There’s something unabashedly criminal in his demeanor. He possesses the vitality of a man who has only ever followed his own law. What hair he has left on his head is wild, windblown even when the air is still, contrasted by the straight orderly hairs of his mustache. Beyond that, the mill mechanic is a man who seems to be perpetually covered in grease. These times on the baseball diamond, when he is in a baseball uniform instead of a pair of coveralls, are a bit like seeing a priest without his frock. The mechanic’s eyes are sharp, full of a cutting sort of intelligence. Those eyes are always shaking the world apart looking for loose screws.

“Pete,” the mechanic asks nonchalantly, “who’s playing catcher for the pulp mill? They just swapped out and I don’t like the way this new guy is looking at me.”

“I don’t know. Dan something?” my dad mutters. Knowing him he would have been preoccupied with his duty as base coach.

“Is that his wife in the stands? The one with the tits?”

Dutch only nods toward the stands without looking himself because the way the story goes it’s obvious who he’s talking about. No other woman in history has a set close to this legendary pair.

“Yeah, I think so,” my dad replies.

“Oh fuck, Pete,” Dutch murmurs looking from the catcher to the stands and back again with astonishment, “I think I fucked her.”

“Dan Ansbaugh,” my dad says, finally settling on the last name of the catcher.

The catcher lifts up his mask and stares down at third base. A hazy memory of a drunken night at the tavern floats across Dutch’s memory. Dutch can see his own murder in those eyes from ninety feet away.

“Ah fuck, Pete! I know I fucked her!”

Then there’s a bit of magical timing, rarely witnessed in life but common in stories. Corky, a man so named because his ass crack is always showing and everyone teases him that they’re going to shove a cork in his butt to keep it closed, gets up to bat and hits a grand slam. Like out of a goddamn movie, or so the story goes.

The runner on second sprints by Dutch who has very intelligently refused to move an inch toward the home plate. Then the runner from first zips by as well. And now everyone notices Dutch standing there on third base next to my father refusing to move while the catcher takes off his mask and chest guard and begins slowly walking in their direction.

Everyone knows what this means without knowing the circumstances. The thing the game is meant to simulate, that thing being male group combat, has just became real. You stand by your people in times like this. You get up and raise your fists no matter what one of your own has done. Thats an ancient law that doesn’t need to be explained.

So there’s a big fight, sawmill versus pulp mill. Aberdeen against Cosmopolis. Or a big shoving match between the two teams at any rate, where Dutch has been placed in a protective ring by the sawmill and the pulp mill has surrounded Dan Ansbaugh to talk him out of doing anything stupid. Poor Corky arrives late to the commotion after running the bases, confused and a little upset to realize his moment of triumph has been subverted by Dutch’s sexual indiscretions.

That’s the end of the story in the common telling. Nothing much happened after the fight except some black eyes and bruised egos. There was no reckoning either for Dutch or Dan. No lessons learned or truth revealed. The legendary tits were never seen again and faded into history.

When my brother and I, mere children, asked Dutch why he’d slept with a married woman he only laughed, put his hands under his shirt, and held them out as mock breasts.

“Duh! I mean… DUH!” he’d shout.

When we got a little older he used his fingertips to stand in as nipples. Still shouting “Duh!” whenever we questioned his behavior he’d make sure to flop his hands all over under his shirt. That’s all the excuse he ever offered and I don’t think the inquisition could have gotten an ounce of contrition.

Torn between a friend’s discretion and a father’s duty, my dad later told us that Dutch hadn’t known she was married and had been ashamed of it but also that we shouldn’t tell him we knew. Dutch would never make an excuse like that. He’d see it as putting on airs. Something for silly rich kids who’d been off to college. Besides, it would be too damaging to his reputation. Everyone knew that Dutch didn’t give a shit about anything.

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Something like seventy years ago a blind piano tuner went into a convent and talked one of the nuns into becoming his wife. They had a kid. That kid was Dutch. He spent his childhood going into old churches with his dad and doing things like working on organs or other musical equipment while his mom labored in futility against his wild streak to make him the best Catholic who ever lived. To all outward appearances, she failed. With an origin story like that, Dutch never had to explicitly describe himself as a mythical force of nature but there was something of the style of Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed or Davy Crockett whenever anyone described him in a story. It seemed like he had the power of a hero to bend events into his own personal narrative and make everything bigger and more significant. He stood outside and above the normal, everyday chain of cause and effect. You had to buy into the hype. This strange man, this peculiar person who I literally only ever saw not covered in grease and wearing coveralls at funerals, by sheer force of personal charisma had once been married to Miss Washington. Women certainly seemed drawn to him like a magnet.

In the pantheon of timber country heroes, Dutch fell into the story-telling trickster archetype. One time, during a tough contract negotiation with management, Dutch let them know that all the most expensive parts in the supply room were all mysteriously missing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of critical equipment to keep the mill running in the event of machine failure just up and vanished! Some unknown villain had likely taken all of them and hidden them throughout the mill in out of the way places. Management would never be able to find them. Probably, if the contract was acceptable that year, whoever took them would put them back. Wouldn’t you know it, after the contract was signed Dutch led the charge personally and found every single lost part. Management cheered him as a hero. That’s what I mean about him standing outside the normal chain of cause and effect. If you or I had done that we would have been found out right away and wound up in prison.

Trickery was a way of life for Dutch. An end unto itself, like Tom Sawyer tricking his neighborhood pals in white-washing a fence. There needed to be some angle to get him excited. One summer, Dutch hired me to split firewood for him and quoted an exorbitant fee. I was very intrigued by this as Dutch was known to be stingy. All I had to do was split all the firewood in his driveway, which would take me at most two days, and I’d walk away with four-hundred dollars. He made sure to stress that he needed to see everything cut before he’d make the payment. All the firewood in his driveway he stressed again. We shook hands on it. I made good progress the first day and figured I’d have a half a day following to get the rest. By the time I showed up, Dutch had filled his driveway with new firewood to be cut, more than before, and laughed his ass off as I walked around in confusion. I quit right there rather than open myself up to new exploitation, so Dutch got trickier with my brother and only put new wood out a bit at a time so that he never quite noticed.

For all that, he was a charmer as much as a trickster. If there was a party, Dutch would grab the oldest most grandmotherly woman available and start vigorously dancing with her while giving loud and lavish praise on her good looks and grace. A handful of times he managed to sweet talk some lovely matron into doing something slightly risqué in front of her entire bloodline and the whole crowd would roar. He operated from a higher place of authority wherein you had no right to not have a good time in his presence. I think this is probably why women loved him so much even though he was a short, balding, humble mill mechanic who was always covered in grease and wearing coveralls. He made life interesting. He’s also the reason I roll my eyes a bit when I hear someone lean too much into alpha male thinking. If you’re brave enough, nobody cares what you look like.

Dutch was my father’s best friend from decades before any of us kids came along. From the time I could remember he was always there in the background. Helping my dad work on our cars, or playing cribbage, or something else. Half the time my dad left the house, other than to go to work, it was to borrow something from Dutch.

Dutch loved to tell us stories.

Especially stories about getting his ass kicked.

Especially when my father was going on and on about being tough.

The story went that Dutch was at a bar and it wasn’t clear why exactly it happened but he got on the bad side of a state wrestling champion. He said something flippant and then he felt a giant pair of hands fall on his chest. Telling the story to us kids, Dutch grabbed himself by the front of his shirt and threw himself over the couch in his living room. I don’t know how but he made it look like he’d been thrown by an invisible giant.

“Whup!” He shouted, then popped up from the other side of the couch. His eyes went wild with surprise like he was back in that moment at the bar. No sooner did he pop up on that side of his couch before he threw himself back over with another shout of, “Whup!”

He staggered through his modest home, utterly disheveled, looking over his shoulder in fear, then arrived in his kitchen grabbed a spatula and pretended to flip something back and forth across his counter. An invisible pancake did innumerable flips and contortions under Dutch’s rapid-fire hands. “It was like this, see? This is what it was fucking like when that son of a bitch put his fucking hands on me. Oh, I was like a rag doll! Fucking nothing I could do to that bastard even slowed him down.”

The moral of this story was, “don’t fuck with wrestlers.”

There was no audience there but me, my brother, and my father.

My father objected to this because no matter how skilled someone was you always had the option to just be tougher and meaner than anyone else thought possible. You could go berserk and win the confrontation by crossing all kinds of boundaries the other person would be too timid to even approach. In my father’s defense, I’ve seem him do this with profound effect.

Dutch looked to us kids and wagged a finger at my dad.

“Pinky Freeman! Pinky fucking Freeman!” Dutch let the name fall like a condemnation from heaven. “Did you go ‘berserk’ on Pinky fucking Freeman when he kicked your ass, Pete? He fucking flattened you, I heard. Huh, is that what you did? Huh Pete? Pinky fucking Freeman!”

My dad became visibly upset by the reminder, then apoplectic, sputtering to defend his reputation.

“Listen, that was different. He had five of his friends with him—“

This was an ancient story of my uncle Mike’s cowardice and betrayal way back when my dad had been in high school. Pinky Freeman and his friends had seen my father and uncle walking on the other side of a fence and an old wrong had to be addressed. My uncle Mike promptly abandoned my father and took off running to safety. Rather than run away himself, my father had waited for the group to run around the fence and took them head on. This was my father’s only loss in a fight and he insisted if Mike had been there it would have been different.

“— and it took every fucking one of ‘em to kick your ass, didn’t it, Pete? That’s not what I heard! That’s not what I heard! I heard Pinky fucking Freeman kicked the shit out of you all by himself! I heard his friends just watched so they could keep it fair and so you couldn’t run away like a little bitch! Did you cry, Pete? Did you break down and cry when Pinky fucking Freeman kicked your ass? Huh, did ya Pete? Did ya sob? Picture you just standing there trying to fight five men like a goddamn tree stump! Dumber than a fucking hemlock stump!”

While he gave this speech, Dutch raised one of his pinky fingers and poked it in my father’s direction and wiggled it all about.

My father became so incensed he could hardly speak.

“You getting flustrated, Pete? Are you flustrated?”

This was Dutch’s special portmanteau, a combination of flustered and frustrated, when he got so far under someone’s skin they could hardly speak. I confess he often left me flustrated. He had other taglines, such as telling anyone who offended his sensibilities that they were dumber than a hemlock stump. Or, shouting “I’ve been fucked by the fickle fucking finger of fucking fate!” whenever he hit a streak of bad luck.

“Look at you telling little kids about how fucking awesome it is to kick someone’s ass! Well, Pinky fucking Freeman put you straight is what I heard! Just handled you like a child the way I heard it told! Oh yeah, let’s tell them about that side of kicking ass!”

It wouldn’t occur to me for some years later that there is something deeply moral about teaching children that violence doesn’t always go as planned and that it sometimes has a way of turning on you instead. Or, that this moral lesson had been Dutch’s intent with his various rants.

Dutch was no coward, though. I don’t know what happened but my sister was in the backseat of the car once when Dutch ran out of a bar with blood all over his right fist. He came out last, having shoved my dad out the door first. “Just fucking go, Pete! Floor it! Goddamn it Pete, put the petal to the fucking metal!” She says that he looked like he wanted to yell at my dad but didn’t do it for her sake.

They didn’t talk about whatever it was that happened.

He smoked constantly but only in one room of the house, an iron-clad rule he held as equal to civilized behavior. You could believe his mother was a nun the way he kept to certain rules like that, especially around food. He found terrible barbecue to be blasphemous and I personally witnessed him walk up to the grill of a passing acquaintance, grimace in revulsion at their work, loudly declare the food not fit for human consumption, and then promptly throw all of it into a nearby forest. Dutch demanded both a thank you and an apology when the owners returned. Somehow, under force of his peculiar charisma, he received both.

He had no filter whatsoever. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who swore almost as much as my father. That’s what I mean by him living by his own law. Black humor was perhaps the most important thing in the world to him although he never put it in those terms. When Dutch saw a guy from the mill at the hardware store who had left work because he had terminal cancer, Dutch jumped up and down crying bullshit because the soon to be dead man was far past the expiration date he had been promised. Dutch tapped his watch and shouted, “Ain’t you fucking dead yet?”

When a very heavyset woman was being terribly rude and stood up to start a physical altercation with another woman, Dutch immediately pretended to be a circus master commanding an elephant to perform tricks. “Up Simba! Up! Up!” And then he held up an imaginary hoola-hoop for her to jump through.

If these seem like really rude, dirty sonofabitch thing to do someone then, yes, I agree. So would Dutch. Dutch didn’t want you to think of him as a nice, polite person. Dutch wanted you to know he was about the worst person in the world. He was vile and if you ever called him out on inappropriate behavior his defense of himself would be to point to even greater sins.

“How can I be racist when my favorite prostitutes are black? Riddle me that one, kid. Huh?” Dutch spoke around a mouthful of French fries, defending a rude joke that I had corrected him for. “Nothing to say? Head the size of a goddamn pumpkin and you don’t have anything to say to that one? Her name was Chi-Chi and she was the best prostitute I ever met. You fucking hear me? The fucking best!”

I am a bit of a stick in the mud, and it was worse when I was twelve. In my reverse rebellion against my father, who would have been much more comfortable with me sneaking out to drink alcohol with friends or trying to have sex, there was no rule that I was not willing to follow to the letter. One of those rules was to not be racist.

This was, I can say with all honesty, not endearing.

Having Dutch move from an accusation of racism to a soliloquy on his love of prostitution felt a bit like being nuked from orbit. I had no idea where to go next. I sputtered trying to justify myself.

“You getting flustrated? Huh? Pete, looks like your kid is getting flustrated! Whole fucking family dumber than hemlock stumps!”

Every time I tried to say something, Dutch went on and on about Chi-Chi’s work ethic. The way she was fully engaged with her occupation. How he hadn’t been able to believe it was even possible for a woman to do things like that.

In his own way, Dutch was a brilliant man. There is no other way to put it. It was as if he was an overeager actor, who had been told every line he would ever say throughout his entire life, and he was just waiting for you to say your line before he could give his utterly perfect, biting response. Except of course the trick of it was that he was always willing to turn the tables by saying, “Yes! That is true! But also I’m much worse than you think!”

Maybe Dutch wanted you to like him, but he definitely didn’t want you to think he was a good person. Not for a moment. Not him. Not some dirty, grease-covered, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed mechanic. Being a good person was for monks and other religious weirdos who spent their whole life in service to others. Or for liars who held their noses too high to look down at their own hypocrisy. Dutch wasn’t going to put on airs to pretend to be something he wasn’t. Except, of course, that he was.

How can I say this so that you’ll understand? Especially after some of these outlandish defects in character. Dutch was a good person, yes, but he was a good person in the same way that some people are serial killers. The behavior had that same quality of a compulsive expression of an inescapable nature. It was like there was some call in him that he would try to ignore, try to push off, so as not to be caught and then the temptation would get to be too much and it would overwhelm him. And after Dutch did whatever kind act that would in theory make everyone think well of him, he would try to conceal it the same way that a murderer might stash a body in a dumpster or throw it into a river. A man has to protect his reputation.

How’s this for a reversal? When the kid of that man dying of cancer at the hardware store needed new sports gear, Dutch found him walking around and started bitching and moaning about money he owed his father from a sports bet. His father had basically tricked him, Dutch said, but he knew just the thing! He’d pay for all the basketball stuff the kid needed and it would probably even work out to his advantage! A scam pulled on a dying man. Who could see anything virtuous in that? So, Dutch bought all the stuff, and the kid got new shoes and the money he needed for his jersey and nobody ever bothered to tell anyone else that Dutch had never made any such bet.

Whenever a man had been injured, his hard hat was sent around the mill like a donation plate at church to be filled with cash by his coworkers. That hard hat started its passage down the line from the mechanic’s shop and the first money to go in came from Dutch.

I don’t know how many times he lent my dad money but I know it was a lot. Dutch was as much a part of my family’s finances as my grandfather. He did my dad’s taxes every year. He picked up my dad and carried him across five divorces. Dutch’s couch was the first and only couch my dad ever landed on when one of his marriages failed, despite all the insults Dutch would heap upon him and all the things Dutch would say to make sure my dad took his share of the blame. I’m sure I was the unknowing recipient of his charity multiple times throughout my life. All those times my dad was flat broke until his next payday only to have money the next day.

As for Chi-Chi, he almost got her to leave the life. It became his sole focus for some extended period of time. I don’t know much about that story other than that she left Vegas with Dutch for a few weeks and made a go at playing house, and that he was a bit brokenhearted when she decided that kind of life wasn’t for her. He was also in his very early twenties and stupid and never made those kinds of mistakes ever again.

Worst of all was when it came to light that Dutch had been paying for the free lunch program at a small local grade school for years. The details have always been hazy to me, but I believe some relation of his couldn’t figure out how to make the state pay for this and the school was too small for anyone else to help. They held an assembly in Dutch’s honor without asking for permission and word got around. To Dutch, this was the worst thing to have ever happened. It was far worse than being accused of murder or some other heinous crime. It was exactly the way you or I would feel if some small, beautiful, innocent child stood up and made a public accusation of sexual indecency.

Dutch did his best to tell everyone it wasn’t true and it was way more complicated than that or that it was some kind of scam, but nobody believed him. It was too funny that mean, nasty old Dutch was a softie. Aww, did you want to help the wittle kids, Dutch? Did you want to be the big dada to all the wittle kids, Dutch? Did you want to be a hero like in one of the movies? If you saw Dutch during this period of time he often looked stricken, or ill, and even when he got cancer some years later it wasn’t nearly so hard on him as people thinking he was a decent, moral person. It was his whole world and his whole identity, constructed over his whole life, being turned upside down. His ancient mother even told him she was proud and you would have thought she’d poisoned him. This is very much not a joke and I wish I had been wise enough at the time to have a conversation with him on the topic.

There was a reason why Dutch found it hard to stay in relationships and never had a family of his own, although I won’t write it down. Dutch had the healthiest reaction to my writing about my life when I went off to college, which was to bring me to his gun cabinet on one of my visits home and say, “Don’t you ever fucking write anything about me you fucker.” My dad told me that reason once and I could tell as soon as it left his mouth that he wished he could take it back. He finally found the point at which a friend’s discretion outweighed a father’s duty. I’ll only say that it’s all too common of a story and that ever after it made me look at Dutch in a different and more sympathetic light. We all want to believe we are too mysterious for our behaviors to be easily explained by tragedy or heartache, but none of us is so complex. There were reasons Dutch never had a family of his own and that he clung to my own. I’ll only say that he couldn’t ever face the possibility of coming close only to lose it all ever again.

“Ah fuck, they’re like my own fucking kids!” He’d tell his last wife, a sweetheart who had accepted a rubber o-ring in place of a wedding band. They’d been high school sweethearts and found each other again in their golden years. Dutch didn’t have kids of his own but he wanted his wife to see us as his family. Even me, for all my strange ways. He’d been there for our whole lives, known us since we were little. Taught us all our first curse words. He wanted us to know each other.

When the mill shut down, Dutch retired. That was the beginning of the end. Time, ever fleeting, took no notice of his charisma or his personal legend. Without the mill to keep him active, he sat in his back room more and more often and smoked cigarette after cigarette while, watching old cowboy movies. His wife was the light of his life and when he wasn’t watching old Gary Cooper movies, he was trying to make the home nice for her. A lump slowly appeared on the back of Dutch’s head but he refused to go to the hospital until he passed out and started having a seizure. My dad found him like that and almost picked him up and ran him to the hospital himself before he remembered to call an ambulance.

Dutch was serene and charming for the last few years of his life, although always with his particular edge. Dutch loved my wife and told her she was the only good decision I’d ever made. Being Dutch, he also went on a long soliloquy to my wife about how he and my father had spent years trying to figure out if I was gay. This was an old hobby horse of his because I did well academically and didn’t date in high school. Then he laughed and laughed when I got flustrated asking him to be polite. My wife found it all very charming and wanted to stop by whenever we visited town. Dutch made sure to tell her all manner of embarrassing stories about my childhood and stressed the importance of our connection and that my father had been his best friend for his whole life. We were family. We were all family.

If you live long enough, smoke enough cigarettes, and something else doesn’t get you first, you get cancer. Dutch knew that. He just didn’t want to go out like a coward, begging and crying away all of his decisions. That’s how he saw it, anyway. He figured when death came for him that would be it and he wouldn’t dignify it with some humiliating losing battle. Just let it happen if it’s going to happen. That seemed dignified to him. Except for my dad and his wife, he did put up the fight. Just a few more years, they begged him. Fight so we can all just have a few more years together.

My father never cried when his dad passed away. When his mother died, he greeted the news with something close to relief. I’ve seen my dad’s whole life wash away from under his feet without him making much more than a grunt. I was there when he cut off the tip of his own thumb and all he did was curse a few times. When Dutch passed my father couldn’t even talk from crying so hard. It was like his heart had been ripped from out of his chest and he didn’t know how to live anymore. Nobody could talk to him and nothing could comfort him. It was like two trees had grown up in a forest leaning up against each other, each twisted about the other, and when one died the other could no longer stand.

A few years later, I found a picture of my dad and Dutch in the glovebox of his truck while looking for some work gloves. I promptly clicked it shut again so he wouldn’t know I’d seen. I write it here only so you can know that love never really dies and that even gruff old men are conquered by that emotion in the end.

We named our first child after Dutch. It seemed fitting since he was born not long after and Dutch passed away. We could give him continuity in that sense and my wife loved the idea. I only wish we had a chance to tell him the plan before he passed and that my son had a chance to meet him. I wrote this to show my son one day when he is much older so that he can know about his namesake. I want him to be unafraid to have a big personality or a big life, but I also I want him to know that love, like time, conquers all. It’s the thing that creeps in around the edges, and sneaks up on you so that you do things like pay for the free lunch program at a small grade school. It’s the decent, dignified thing in every human heart that we can’t trample out no matter how hard we try. It is, I think, what is meant by the saying that we are all children of God.